Welcome to the site. You seem to have three questions here. I would suggest asking them as separate questions as well as expending each question. Currently, they are a little terse.
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SardathrionJun 27 '13 at 6:27

11 Answers
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It is the idea that you can physically use spirit energy. If you've ever watched Bleach (you should if you haven't. It's awesome), you'll hear them referring to it as reiatsu.

It's totally a myth of course. What old school practitioners of martial arts understood as spirit energy is actually just good old physics and/or body mechanics. When "building up qi", all you're really doing is relaxing your muscles which means there is more "snap" in your technique. Or when you "use qi to root yourself into the ground", all you're really doing is acting like dead weight. If you've ever tried to pick up a friend when his muscles are tense and again when his muscles are limp (dead weight), you'll understand the difference.

Your viewpoint is diametrically opposed to some of my experience, hence the request for citations. You make some assertions which need context and/or references; i.e. you need to include that it is your opinion or experience. You've also neglected to answer an important part of the question - has it been scientifically investigated? Any answer that dismisses something that is the basis of a 3000 year old medical practice and is at the root of several of the more ancient arts needs to include references to studies and established sources.
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slugster♦Jun 27 '13 at 12:10

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+1. Yeah, it does lack source. How can you prove that something does not exist? All you can do is test practitioners's claims of using spiritual energy. Every scientific experiment ever done to investigate magic, psicics, faith healers, homoeopathy, or any other mythical spiritual power always yielded negative results.
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SardathrionJun 27 '13 at 12:51

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I hold a senior degree in an actual martial art, surely my view is a little more grave than simply "opinion". And to answer the other objection: the Nazi's studied the existence of chi, or "vril" as the called it, without success. This is not an argument from nazi, I am simply pointing out that some of the most brilliant scientists of the 20th century DID in fact study it and found that it didn't exist.
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Juann StraussJun 27 '13 at 13:18

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@slugster So, people need references when they disagree with you, but not when they agree with you? And what references, exactly, would be appropriate here? If you want references, post your own answer with them. Note that the burden of proof is on the person claiming that extremely unlikely magical powers exist, not on the person giving an Occam's razor style more plausible explanation.
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Dave LiepmannJun 27 '13 at 14:28

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Juann I'm aware of the studies and their results, I'm simply encouraging you to cite them and include excerpts where possible or relevant. As you will know we also discourage extended discussion via the comments, if you want to continue I've created a chat room for it: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/9438/qi-power Alternatively you could seek clarification via the MA Meta site.
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slugster♦Jun 28 '13 at 10:59

What do we mean when we say Qi?

It's not possible to scientifically study Qi until people agree on what it is. If it's good body mechanics, then that's perfectly reasonable. Nobody would argue that some people use their body well and can punch hard because they know how to relax and efficiently use their muscles.

But if Qi is supposed to be something supernatural, then it very quickly becomes absurd. People claim they can perform no-touch knockouts with Qi, but they always fail when asked to do it on someone who is not their student. That tells us that their students are playing along--usually due to unconscious social pressure. Note that in that video, Dillman says that Qi is a radio wave. If it's a radio wave, then we can test that, study it, see if it's present, and examine where it comes from. In fact Qi is not a radio wave--Dillman is just making up BS.

Qi debunked--over and over and over

Proponents of Qi will always find a way to keep believing, despite every instance of Qi being shown to be bunk. Skeptical people keep testing claims of Qi and keep finding them to be plainly false. Over and over, whenever we scientifically examine Qi, it turns out to be a parlortrick. Scientists aren't interested in claims so vague that we don't even know what Qi is or what it does. To scientifically study it, first decide what you're trying to prove:

That people get knocked out sometimes when you punch them hard in the right place?

That some people hit harder than others?

That we breathe and our blood circulates?

That some fat old guy can knock people out without touching them?

Qi is similar to the medieval idea of humours, or astrology. They are both clumsy attempts to describe very real phenomena (people getting sick, people getting knocked out with a punch to the neck) with naive and ultimately incorrect frameworks. It turns out that the planets don't even move the way that astrology describes, and that phlegmatic humours were just a shot in the dark that turned out to be wrong, and that Qi was just a way to vaguely describe medical and martial phenomena that people didn't understand.

Good answer but a little unfair to call it hand-waving. It's a pre-scientific word for energy used in many different contexts by chinese people today where we would say energy.
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WudangAug 15 '13 at 1:19

This article on how Qi came west points out the origins of the confusion around the word:

The commonly accepted idea in the west that Chinese medicine is an energetic, metaphysical medicine was singlehandedly created by a French bank clerk with no training in medicine or ancient Chinese language.

...

If you look up qi in a Chinese dictionary, there are ten definitions but not a single one of them is energy. Qi is defined as vital vapor, air, or the essence of air. It can also refer to the function of something (i.e. the qi of an organ would refer to the function of that organ) and the weather. Qi does not mean energy.

A few chinese (born and trained) tai chi guys I've worked with have said "When the old people talked about Qi they meant leg strength".

I think the main thing Qi does is subconsciously boost your own willpower. This may be simplified, but it works like a placebo. If someone believes they have an increased energy about them that will allow them to defeat their opponent, their thought goes less into fear and doubt, more into trusting their body and their knowledge/technique.

When training at home, i find that my spiritual excersises from tai chi have absolutely no effect on my performance. At first i relied on these techniques before training, but now i know the precise way to use each muscle and joint, i do not waste my time.

Being that most people seem to be incredibly biased on the subject, i doubt there is any credible scientific work into the subject. As for 'How can we achive this?', have no doubt in your technique and train for a lifetime. Keep in mind the martial arts grandmasters who claim to use Qi have been training their entire lives and have the skill and willpower to outmatch someone twice their physical strength.

Your Qi or Ki or Chi or Energy or Willpower is really how much energy [as in actual electrical charge] you are willing to put into your body's muscles before deciding that you have lost and will not win the arm wrestle, or will not be able to hold your ground when being pushed, i could go on.

One more thing i have to mention, on my first kung fu lesson, i watched a video of myself, my brother and two friends [with our eyes closed] being pushed forward or backwards by the sifu without him touching us, we were told this was Qi. His hand was very close but not close enough to make contact with the skin or hairs so i think this is a combination or two things, - the fact you are expecting to be pushed in one direction
-your mind picking up signals such as heat, sounds at a negligible amount you would not normally pay them any attention and/or [i would like to believe, because it's cool] minute interference in your electric circuits due to the radiation given off by another persons electric circuit in close proximity. Either way it is nothing supernatural.

I used to believe in Qi when i started martial arts until i realized it was, as i say, a placebo.

Qi is a term that gets used to mean a lot of things, and the most common usage as an independent energy force, is regularly shown to have no evidence supporting it. That said, here's some ideas of the different things people mean when they talk about qi:

Muscle & Joint Activation

"Try to move my arm! You can't! My qi is what keeps it up!" A lot of these are good uses of body mechanics - often positions that allow you to use both agonist and antagonist muscles together for structural efficiency in holding static positions, or intelligent use of positioning and muscle chains for dynamic movements.

Activating some of these muscles often works best with a bit of visualization or movement that seems completely mental - "Hold your arm out, point at something in distance, try to reach it with your fingers, as if you were extending your energy beyond your fingers - seen how strong your arm is now? See how hard it is to pull it down? This is Qi."

Although thinking of energy flowing to different parts of your body, or beyond your body can help you do stuff like this, you can replicate the same results with good body coaching in other terms, so it's not any kind of energetic force.

The flipside, especially used in martial arts, is that you can "feel their qi by touch" which mostly is reading the intent of the person's movements because you can feel subtle changes in their balance and muscle tension - basketball players do this all the time when they stick someone.

Assessment of several body functions

If you end up studying acupuncture or tradition chinese medicine, they may use the word qi, but you find out there's over a dozen qi types referred to in the body: "circulatory qi", "Heart qi", "digestion qi" etc.

In this case, when you assess someone and try to figure out how to help them, the quality of the individual qi is looking at the combined results of several body functions working together - your digestion for example involves your stomach, gallbladder, liver, small and large intestine, etc.

In this sense, it's basically clumping a lot of organs together into a larger system, and it's not something to prove or disprove anymore than it's a convenient way to assess overall health, much in the same way doctors say "Circulatory system" without necessarily talking about each part.

Breath

Many translate qi as "wind" or "breath" so it's not a hard guess as to why this is the way it gets used sometimes. No breathing = dead, breathing = alive, so it's not hard to see how a lot of folks would see this as the sign or source of life energy. An old Chinese folk idea is that everyone has a limited number of breaths they get before they die in life, so slowing the breathing extends your lifespan.

Life Energy

This is the usual method talked about, which involves the usual point of qi pathways, acupuncture, acupressure, and even action at a distance. So far, no scientific study has proven or matched 1:1 to traditional Chinese medicine theory, martial arts theories, or meditation/yoga type work in this manner. Several studies have reported minor but notable benefits for several things (pain relief, increased mobility of limbs, lowered blood pressure), but nothing has matched completely.

How can we scientifically study this?

Well, lots of studies are being made all the time. Including in China, Taiwan, Singapore and many places where TCM is already a major part of the society.

If you want to study outside the medicine side, I would be looking first to understand explicitly what you're trying to get from it, since, with so many definitions, and people often using qi for any/all of them, you would want to structure your experiments to test for just one of them.

A secondary and useful context is to also understand that anyone advocating a skill or ability with qi is probably extremely varied in terms of skillfulness and training. Outside of China's TCM system, which is a fairly modern construction, everyone got individualized training of different theories, quality and ability even within the same "school" or lineage.

And a lot of these things also underwent a lot of destabilizing factors that made it difficult to assure transmission - look up the history of civil war and famine in 20th century China where 40 million people dying in a short period is kind of a regular occurrence. Stack on top the Cultural Revolution driving a lot of people out who have these skills or schools and you can see even people who claim the same lineage may have very different theoretical understandings and practices of qi.

So I would probably add a third layer, which is even after you narrow down what you're testing for, I'd probably also sort out the people you'd be testing based on what they claim their theory base is of qi - since it may drastically affect what they're really doing and what outcomes are the result.

Many of the other answers discuss the rational Western view of qi (or chi or ki)--that it is a mythical "wind," "power," "spirit," or "energy" claimed by traditional Chinese medicine, Daoist cosmology, and traditional martial arts heritage to be the primary invigorating force in human beings. It's a popular idea, with analogs across many cultures. It's the "ki" in Korean or Japanese arts. It's echoed in yoga and elsewhere.

The rational, Western, scientific view is that it doesn't exist. It's a concept inherited from an ancient world that did not understand how physics, biology, and medicine really work, and so invented a poetic, shamanistic, religious story as though they did.

As a rational Western scientist, I don't disagree with this skepticism.

But...

Whether you believe qi is a "real," tangible thing/force may not be the most important issue.

My experience is that training as though qi is a thing is genuinely helpful even if you don't believe it's real. How can that be? Because considering, talking about, and training qi focuses attention on useful aspects of what we feel, how we physically act, and what we intend to do that we would not otherwise be focusing on.

In training marital arts, acrobatics, dance, and other motion-involved activities, many of the elements of kinesthetics, balance, and proprioception are subtle learned capabilities--things we must learn to do, feel, or feel comfortable with that are not necessarily "built in" or entirely natural. Considering qi can focus our attention on gathering and emitting energy--a focus that is functionally useful, even if it's only a metaphor.

There is actually a lot more precedent for this type of model in Western thought than you might think. Legal fictions, for example, are places courts and legislatures assume a set of facts or circumstances that are not strictly true--because it's useful to do so. Philosophy--whether ancient or modern--is replete with such assumptions. And the clincher: So is modern science and mathematics. See e.g. electrical engineering, quantum mechanics and string theory, which eagerly use models of virtual and imaginary constructs when "the math works out better that way."

So be a skeptic about qi if you like, or outright disbeliever. I am! But that doesn't mean you shouldn't consider or use the metaphor as a martial arts (and motion arts) training tool. I do, with good success.

It's not so complicated. Chi is nothing but a precise experience that, when recognized, leads you on. We can not arrive at near-perfection in our movements and body dynamics and breathing and application of force by reasoning or by drawing diagrams on a blackboard, we only arrive there through our experience.

Chi means cultivating a feeling; it is the cultivation of that special feeling we have when we move or stand and breathe, walk and apply force in a perfect way. By cultivating that feeling, we develop our capacity in a very concrete way (of course a good method is needed!). It's not supernatural, on the contrary it is the way of nature; it can look supernatural to observers just as gymnasts or acrobats or skaters or riders can look supernatural to untrained spectators.

Everybody uses "chi"; doing it consciously and with good method helps a lot. That's all.

Let us try to combine the descriptions an experience of a 3000 year old culture with the scientific accievments of our time:

To my understanding Qi means the energy or a fighter has available. That is to say, if I am tired or exhausted my Qi is low, but when I am well rested I have a lot of Qi.

That would fit the answers others have provided like "Qi is the power of your kick".

It also would also provide a scientific prove that greter Qi can be attained trough a healthy life style and MA practice, the latter allowing you to create more powerful techniques through more precise execution.

Also certain breathing techniques are known to calm your body, thereby removing stress, thereby allowing a regeneration and increased energy.

Finally, from an ethymological viewpoint, I the last syllable of "energy" sounds a lot like "Qi" (Chi).

My Brother studied bajiquan in china and learned that qi is not energy, it is literally 'your air' hence the variety of breathing techniques involved. When used in martial arts, qi is not the power and energy you used, but it is the force from the air you use.
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曾気青昭雄Aug 16 '13 at 10:47

I realize I am the devil's advocate here but I would like to add some relevant information even if it is downvoted. Chi power is real, albeit incredibly rare. If someone is bragging about how much chi power they have, they probably don't have any chi power. By chi power I mean neijin or internal force.

You cultivate neijin by practicing martial qigong. Neijin is a fundamentally different type of force than muscular strength or li. You should not practice martial qigong on your own. You need a teacher who has neijin in order to teach you how to get it. Otherwise, you will probably not make any progress and get hurt instead.

I don't know of any scientific studies that focus on neijin specifically but there are plenty that have studied qi. Here is a blog post by my teacher on the subject. Chi and neijin are not mythical or supernatural, just uncommon and foreign to the western scientific paradigm. For some reason, there is an abundance of qigong and taijiquan teachers who know nothing about chi and even some who believe it is a myth.

It is important to realize something when talking about this: masters who have chi power are highly respected and extremely valuable. Although the internet may sneer at them, they have plenty of students with cash in hand willing to pay them handsomely in order to learn. What would their motivation be for "scientifically" validating their art? They already know it works, their students know it works, and it provides everyone involved tremendous benefits. If they are always worrying about what skeptics think and extremely concerned about proving that their art is real, they probably do not have neijin.

I am sharing this because genuine internal martial arts have brought me tremendous benefit and I would love to see more people cultivating the wonderful benefits. You absolutely have to have a good teacher though. If you don't, you won't make progress. Best of luck to everybody!

"[Masters who 'have chi power'] have plenty of students with cash in hand willing to pay them handsomely in order to learn" -- people pay all sorts of con artists for the privilege of being scammed.
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Dave LiepmannJan 4 at 21:08

The Qi power has not been proven scientifically, because currently there is no way to measure or observe Chi by using physical scientific instruments. However there were some attempts to investigate it scientifically and below you can find few sources.

The video demonstrates that Chi can protect the body and provides immunity. Shaolin monk with 13-year Qi Gong training and experience (by using the inner Chi) demonstrates power of Chi by withstanding a blow from a baseball bat, and a spear to the neck (and he remains undamaged which in normal condition it would result death).

The conclusion was:

Even having the most advanced (scientific) tools, there is currently no way to measure Chi. But whatever Shaolin warrior gong technique is, there is no denying its results. For now this hidden secret defence will remain a mistery.

There is also another video which shows a Kung Fu Master that proves that you really can break two brick blocks with just your hand and without the use of trickery. He demonstrated also the push technique (no inch punch) by channeling Chi energy from his body to opponent body without using any physically pull-back.

It is all about ability to channel inner Chi energy and reverting it into Gang (power).

That video demonstrated that the monk could withstand these blows, not that "chi" allowed him to. Because the monk calls it "chi" does not make it true. He was probably taught these skills since a very young age and truly believes them to be mystical, or maybe he simply is lying... Also, because the show calls itself "Fight Science" doesn't automatically make it scientific...
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DungarthMar 9 at 17:12

So qi is heat? Or is it getting speared in the neck? Or is it pushing? Or is it breaking bricks? I'm confused.
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Dave LiepmannMar 9 at 19:27

It's not a heat, but heat detector (IR) is the closest scientific instrument which can measure its manifestation. The closest thing you can compare is plasma-type substance (another stage of matter) which is manifested by our conscious intend. That kind of perception was studied over and over again, but modern science still refuses it despite the unexplained results in above videos, but it's just a matter of time.
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kenorbMar 9 at 20:12

Qi is your life force energy. When you die, your life force leaves the body and the skin and flesh become whitish in hue.

You Qi is strengthened in a number of ways (I'm only a piker here.). The breathing methods in traditional karate (as well as other martial arts, yoga, etc.) are a primary way of building up your Qi. Diet, rest, and exercise are also elements of building up strong Qi. Again, I have only a layman's understanding.

The martial arts applications of Qi progress from increased health, to increased physical strength, to levels where the practitioner can mentally direct Qi to areas of the body for protection or to generate force by itself (advanced).

Martial arts exercises, starting with basic techniques, builds Qi through the proper breathing and alignment of the body, which then facilitates the circulation of Qi throughout the body.... leading to the enhancements described above....

Qi, as pure energy, is problematic to sense or measure. As one poster comments, empirical evidence of Qi can be seen in the pink color in one's palm's, the breaking of bricks and boards (especially good vid of the chinese doing this.), and the resistance of the body to what would be certain injury (chinese vids again).

Qi has been scientifically investigated and was found to be little more than belief.
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SardathrionAug 14 '13 at 9:46

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Chinese people today often use the word "qi" for "energy" as we would saying "this painting has a lot of energy", "I don't have the energy to do this", "I slept well so I have a lot of energy"
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WudangAug 15 '13 at 0:58

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Breaking things and not being broken is not qi, it is physical conditioning that every chinese martial artist does. Qi also does not give you more physical strength, it gives you more power. These are 2 different things.
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曾気青昭雄Aug 16 '13 at 10:53